Whereas talking on Kinda Humorous’s Xcast podcast, Starfield lead Todd Howard left the door open on the query of Steam Deck compatibility. The uncooked numbers of Starfield’s minimal system necessities, nevertheless, do not paint a rosy image.
Whereas going over Starfield’s accessibility options, Howard touched on its massive font mode and the way that may be helpful on handhelds, although he additionally clarified that he had sport streaming in thoughts right here. With point out of handhelds, Xcast co-host Mike Howard requested about Steam Deck assist, with the Bethesda veteran replying, “We’ll discuss that later down the highway.”
Hardly conclusive, however the lack of an outright “no” might be the very best bit of reports we have got in relation to Deckfield. It is a faint glimmer of hope within the face of Starfield’s beefy minimal system necessities, necessities even the Deck’s decrease decision calls for may not be capable to elide.
Starfield minimal system necessities
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K
- Reminiscence: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700, NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti
- Storage: 125 GB accessible house
- Extra Notes: SSD Required
These minimal specs are probably pointing to 1080p decision, low graphics, 30fps—at the least that is what I might anticipate of minimal necessities in 2023. With that in thoughts, the Deck has some wiggle room on the graphics card entrance: it isn’t a match for the 1070 Ti or 5700, nevertheless it’s additionally aiming for a extra forgiving 800p (probably 720p) decision.
Nevertheless, whereas the Deck’s 16 GB of RAM may sound like a match on paper, that pool is shared between the remainder of the system and the GPU, as a substitute of getting discrete RAM and VRAM, in order that’s a definite deficit. Equally problematic are these six core, twelve thread CPUs. The 2600X and 6800K are a technology older than the Deck’s quad core, eight thread Zen 2, however that core rely deficit may nonetheless be an excessive amount of to deal with, and there is not a number of graphical tinkering you could possibly do to make up for it.
That is to not point out the 125 GB of SSD house steered, which instantly takes an unmodified base-model Deck off the desk. With all that in thoughts, I am pretty assured you could possibly get Starfield working on the Steam Deck, however except Bethesda do have Deck-specific plans in thoughts “later down the highway,” I do not suppose it will ever be a fascinating platform to benefit from the upcoming house epic on.
